Here’s everything you need to know:

Deactivate and delete organizations in Viva Goals

According to the Microsoft 36 Roadmap, admins can soon deactivate organizations or even delete them when requested from the iva Goals Admin portal. They’ll also be able to configure the settings to deactivate dormant organizations automatically.

The feature is expected to start rolling out to users later this month and should hit general availability by mid-July 2023. Microsoft further added that admins will be able to,

• Deactivate organizations that are not required or even permanently delete them.
• Configure to automatically deactivate and delete inactive organizations.
• Reactivate any deactivated organization within 90 days.

Animated Backgrounds in Teams Meetings

Microsoft is also busy at work in a bid to refresh the meeting experience in Teams with animated backgrounds. The feature will replace the platform’s existing background with a dynamic animation for a more immersive virtual environment. What’s more, it ships with a wide variety of options to enhance the meeting experience with creativity and personalization according to users’ preferences.

Teams already supports pre-defined backgrounds from Microsoft. The feature tagged 122513 in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap is expected to roll out in early July and will hit broad availability later that month.

The are also plenty of updates rolling out across the Microsoft 365 suite. Be sure to check out some of our recap posts for more information.

Featured image via Bing Image Creator

While productivity is a key element in the workplace, by itself alone it’s impossible to achieve success. Instead, it limits creativity, promotes burnout, and disrupts creativity. Per Microsoft’s findings, organizations that pay close to employee engagement tend to “perform twice as well financially.”

With Copilot making its way to Microsoft Viva, it will be possible to leverage its AI capabilities to strike a balance between productivity and employee engagement with the goal of running a successful enterprise.

According to Microsoft:

Copilot in Viva is built on the Microsoft 365 Copilot System, which combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Viva apps to give leaders an entirely new way to understand and engage their workforce.

The company has also discovered that a lot of organizations are finding it difficult to establish clarity as well as alignment when it comes to goal setting, especially after taking on hybrid work.

Microsoft’s 2023 State of Goal Setting Report disclosed that “50 percent of surveyed practitioners stated that having more clarity around their goals gives them a greater sense of purpose and motivates them to work harder. But offering this clarity continues to be a challenge—only 39 percent of practitioners understand organization-level goals.”

However, with Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals, the goal setting process has been simplified. Leaders will now be guided through the process thus making it easier for them to create objectives and key results (OKRs). What’s more, Copilot ships with a capability that suggests draft OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents.

Additionally, the feature will help save time and resources as it is able to summarize the status of OKRs, identify blockers, and suggest the next steps. It’s also worth noting that it can also consolidate existing data and use it to generate more comprehensive check-ins.

Copilot has also made its way to Microsoft Viva Engage to enhance communication practices at the workplace. Microsoft has indicated that some of the best-performing businesses and organizations exhibit impeccably strong leadership communications and engagement with employees.

As such, heads in organizations can leverage Copilot’s capabilities in Viva Engage to come up with “compelling and inspiring posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations.” Furthermore, it can also be used to come up with personalized messages with the ability to adjust the tone depending on the setting or where you are sending the message.

The tool can also be used to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, as well as, recommend responses. As for Viva Learning, users can leverage Copilot’s capabilities to curate learning collections that are tailored to meet each employee’s needs. This way, it’ll be easier to remain engaged and productive.

Copilot is also making its way to Answers and Microsoft Viva Topics, this way employees can learn more about important topics and also have access to complete answers that are fully furnished with appropriate references.

In related news, Microsoft has also announced Viva Glint that’s set to join the Viva suite in July 2023. The tool is designed to help measure and improve employee engagement with the aim of promoting the organization’s success. The company has also indicated that Copilot will make its way to Glint to help summarize the thousands of employee comments thus providing leaders with a new way of interacting with feedback.

This way, employees have access to a curated experience that features relevant news posts, conversations, and other insightful information all in one centralized and convenient location. Microsoft adding tablet support to Viva Connections means users will be able to access the tool across any device.

The experience is already available on desktop and mobile, and now with tablet support, it brings the whole experience full circle. Microsoft stated that:

Now, whether employees are on their mobile device, tablet, or desktop, the same critical news and information from the Dashboard, Feed, or Resources, are easily discoverable and actionable. This is a huge boost to ISVs and Line of business developers of Viva Cards and Teams apps, because users will start accessing Viva Connections on every device they have.

Tablet support for the experience is rolling out to iPad users starting today, however, Android users will begin to have access to the experience starting early April 2023. In related news, Microsoft also launched Viva Connections for Education, a tool designed to help students stay on top of their academics and extracurricular activities.

Microsoft debuted Microsoft Viva Connections Home to meet this need as it creates a modern employee experience. Previously, the employees’ productivity was greatly impacted because of disjointed employee experiences, which in turn led to dissatisfaction.

However, the Microsoft Viva suite and Viva Connections Home have mitigated these issues. Employees will now be able to access the most comprehensive set of employee experiences from one convenient location within a single pane, thus enhancing productivity.

Microsoft has extensively discussed Viva Connections Home in its MidDay Café Viva edition podcast. The podcast covers the ófferings that ship with the neat tool, how to customize them as well as tips and tricks that you can leverage to further enhance your experience.

Check out the video below for more insight:

According to Microsoft:

The best of breed modules covering Employee Connections, Insight, Purpose, and Growth, come to life for employees within the Viva Connections Home. Whether mobile or desktop, Viva Connections Home provides tailored experiences to specific employee groups, roles, or geos with targeted news, conversations, applications, and content powered by AI and Microsoft Graph.

Do you use tool to enhance employee experience? Let us know in the comments.

Microsoft Teams: Insights about people in profile cards

Microsoft has announced that it is set to roll out a new feature dubbed Microsoft Teams: Insights about people in profile cards to Teams users. The feature tagged 116006 in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap will help users know more details about their colleagues across the entire organization such as birthdays, LinkedIn posts, career changes, or pending meeting invites.

The information will be incorporated into the Teams user’s profile card once the feature begins to roll out this month. The feature is already available in Outlook and is set to hit broad availability in Teams by the end of March 2023.

Viva connections come to Android tablets

Viva connections, a tool that Microsoft refers to as “the gateway to a modern employee experience” is making its way to Android tablets. The feature tagged 117388 in Microsoft’s 365 Roadmap is expected to start rolling out later this month and hit general availability by mid-April.

Once the tool ships to Android tablets, it will enhance engagement as well as provide users with insightful information. What’s more, the information is curated to feature relevant news, conversations, and other resources, all in one convenient location.

Custom Templates Available for Whiteboard

Microsoft is enhancing Whiteboard’s user experience with custom templates. The feature tagged 98085 in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap will let users save and share templates in Microsoft Whiteboard. In turn, users will be able to create and save customized layouts and content that can be used to create new whiteboards easily.

The feature is expected to start rolling out early this month and hit general availability towards the end of March. The feature is rolling out to users with WHITEBOARD_PLAN2 and WHITEBOARD_PLAN3.

Send Praise from Viva Connections Dashboard

Viva Connections is also getting a new capability that allows users to add the Praise card from Microsoft Insights on the dashboard. The feature tagged 117378 will let employees send praise to their colleagues. This is similar to the experience that is already available in Microsoft Viva Insights.

The feature will start rolling out early this month and hit general availability later in March.

Outlook: Support Pop-up Messages in Outlook that Warn/Justify/Block Emails Being sent with Sensitivity Labels

And finally, Microsoft has announced that Outlook for desktop’s native sensitivity labeling is set to get support for “oversharing pop-up dialogue as an AIP plug-in to warn, justify, or block emails being sent”.

The feature tagged 100255 is expected to start rolling out in early April and hit general availability late that month, though it is rolling out in preview early in March.

That’s it for this week folks! We invite you to check out last week’s recap in case you missed it. We also have separate posts highlighting new features that shipped to Teams(free), Teams Premium, and Microsoft Excel for the month of February.

Viva Engage later hit general availability featuring a Communities Hub, Storyline, and Stories, all in place to enhance engagement at the workplace. The module is an enhanced version of the Yammer Communities app, and today, Microsoft has announced that Yammer is officially evolving to Viva Engage featuring new experiences.

Alongside the rebrand, during the Inspire event, Microsoft also announced a host of new experiences and capabilities coming to Viva Engage. Today’s announcement indicated that these capabilities have now begun to ship worldwide for Viva suite and Microsoft Viva Topics customers.

The new capabilities consist of a leadership corner “a space for leaders to connect with employees, showcase employee resource groups, and foster culture through discussions, storyline posts, events, and more.” It will also feature a new event style dubbed Ask Me Anything (AMA) events, designed to enhance engagement further.

Microsoft is also incorporating new Advanced Analytics to help users understand their reach and engagement in Viva Engage over a period of time. This will help them keep track of progress and establish trends.

Next month, the rebrand will also be reflected in the existing Communities app for Outlook. During the same period, “the Yammer mobile apps for iOS and Android will also be updated to Viva Engage to provide a native mobile-first experience that’s optimized for social sharing and rich media,” says Microsoft. However, you’ll need to update your app to access the new experience.

The module has since received a ton of improvements as well as features all designed to enhance its user experience. And today, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of new features that will build on the objectives and key results (OKR).

Analytics

First up is the new Analytics feature that is now broadly available and designed to provide admins with more insight in regards to the trajectory that the organization is taking, that is, the successes and setbacks. This way it is easier to make elaborate measures that will help mitigate these issues and allow the organization to run at an optimum level.

Multiple Check-in Owners

Next up, is the transition of Viva Goals from single check-in owner to multiple check-in owners. This makes it easier to “build an effective and inclusive check-in rhythm.” Microsoft further added that, “To reach high level team objectives, there may be more than one owner who is responsible for an OKR’s success. The ability to designate more than one check-in owner helps address customer needs of differentiating ownership, particularly for large projects or during times of transition.”

More languages

The module supports 10 Tier 1 languages currently but with the new capabilities it has expanded its reach and now supports 37 languages in total.

Security and data privacy improvements

Microsoft is also laying more emphasis on security and data privacy with new updates as well as Azure Active Directory. This means that admins can control who has access to certain types of data using Conditional Access Policies. “Our identity updates also include AAD identity federation using 3rd party identity solutions OKTA, and Google. ”

EU Data Residency

EU Data Residency for Viva Goals is widely available meaning EU residents can make use of EU-based data centers to store their data. Viva Goals users gained access last year in December, while Ally.io customers transitioning to Viva Goals will access it later this month.

Microsoft Teams integration

Viva Goals OKRs are integrated with Teams more as a fully featured app. This means that, “Users can view OKRs directly assigned to them, pin OKRs for teams they work with, toggle across different departmental OKRs and see notifications in-app for OKR activities. The new dashboard feature in Teams also offers insights for business review or meeting updates, where users can present and author the dashboard content within Teams.”

Microsoft has promised to include OKRs as a tab in Teams that will allow users to check their notifications directly from their feeds as well as share the OKRs directly into Teams chats and channels.

Power BI integration

Microsoft has integrated Viva Goals with Power BI with the aim of leveraging powerful data driven graphics directly within Viva Goals. In turn, users will be able to identify the metric that resonates with them and then visualize the progress of the Key Results automatically.

Planner integration

Viva Goals now integrates with Microsoft Planner, thus making it easier for users to access their progress and helping them stay on track toward their goals. “Microsoft Planner so you can connect your Planner
tasks and plans to update your KRs and projects in Viva Goals automatically.”

Project integration coming

And finally, users should also look out for the Viva Goals and Project integration that should be available in the near future. It will assist the users to keep track of their milestones and “automatically update to show the
latest status of the connected OKRs and projects.”

Do you use Microsoft Viva Goals? Engage us in the comment section!

Viva Insights Updates 

Employee feedback is a key aspect of any productive organization.  Meeting effectiveness surveys can now be displayed at the end of meetings with five or more participants.  Meeting organizers with a Viva Insights subscription will be able to see the aggregated results and feedback to promote an effective engagement.  Employers and Employees can also set up a Focus mode experience that allows users to break up projects into short undisturbed bursts followed by a short break.  New Quiet Time settings will also allow admins to silence after-hours notifications and limit the use of apps after hours.

New Viva Learning Experiences 

Learning Paths will allow managers to create a sequenced group of learning materials and make those available to employees as a Learning Path that can be discovered and shared through Viva Learning.  A learning path can be created on any topic. Learning collections will allow employees to organize content from Learning Paths to fit their personalized likes and needs.

The new Viva mobile app features a private homepage with access to required information and pieces of training.  You’ll also be able to see your notifications and complete training exercises on the go.

Viva Engage Storyline is Now Available

Viva Engage provides organizations with a way to create social connections between company leaders and various interests inside the organization.  Anyone inside the company can create feature-rich posts to share with others.  These posts will appear in the Storyline which can be viewed in Viva Engage, Outlook, and the Viva Connections feed inside of Teams.

Stories, which is currently in preview, will allow a more feature-rich experience on the Storyline.  This allows users to share short video clips or photo collections to help enhance relationships among colleagues.

Goals Integrations 

Viva Goals has just launched to help employees and organizations keep their goals aligned.  This helps ensure that people are working on the top priorities that they expect to have the biggest impacts.  It also allows employees to see how their work makes a difference.  New third-party integrations with Microsoft Goals from Slack and Google Sheets are available today, with a Jira integration coming soon.  The Slack integration will allow users to receive notifications, and reminders and conduct OKRs directly from Slack.  The Google Sheets integration will allow users to sync their results inside proper sheet cells.  Microsoft will also be releasing integrations for first-party Microsoft tools and OKR notifications with Azure DevOps, Microsoft Planner, Dynamics 365, and more in the future.

First up is Leadership Corner, a platform that helps enhance productivity for both employees and employers. Employees can get to view and take part in activities from their leaders such as surveys and discussions with #Campaigns and AMAs (Ask Me Anything) and finally allow them to interact with new leaders in the organization.

Employers will have access to a new leader dashboard with organizational analytics, storyline announcements that they can use to communicate with their teams, enhanced social campaign experiences, and finally the newly introduced “Ask Me Anything” style events. All these features will help break the communication gap between employees and employers, thus optimizing the organization’s operations.

Microsoft further released a walk-through video of Viva Engage on Microsoft Mechanics, the video highlights how to make the most out of the recently launched tools. Share your thoughts concerning these tools with us below.

And now, Microsoft just announced that Microsoft Viva Sales is set to reach general availability on October, 3. Microsoft will be partnering up with Seismic, an enablement platform that provides businesses with the tools and skills to run a profitable venture.

Through this partnership, our joint customers can streamline the meeting and buyer engagement experience for sales teams and improve productivity through preparation, automation, and intelligence in their daily flow of work. As the first step in this journey, Seismic Enablement Cloud uses Viva Sales’AI-powered insights to recommend content, training lessons, andpre-built digital sales room as post-meeting follow-up actions in Viva Sales.

In turn, users will now have access to real-time business context from a sellers’ CRM system in Outlook and Teams, What’s more, it will also promote efficiency and effectiveness in the business by enhancing connectivity, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.

With more than 270 million monthly active Teams and Microsoft 365 users, Viva Sales acts as a bridge connecting the data and insights sellers need to sell effectively and close deals faster with the productivity and collaboration tools, they use every day.

In other Microsoft Viva news, Microsoft is expanding Viva Goals with new applications and services in an attempt to mitigate the three business imperatives from their latest Work Trend Index Pulse Report. That is, end productivity paranoia, embrace the fact that people come in for each other, and re-recruitment of employees. In turn, this will help enhance the employees’ morale and in turn boost their performance index.

First up is Viva Pulse, an application that will provide a platform designed to enhance communication between managers and team leads. It makes use of both smart templates and research-backed questions that will help businesses identify their strengths and weaknesses. In turn, they will get recommendations on how to address the issues.

Viva Amplify is also coming to Viva Goals, a tool that will help leaders put their points across to employees with an impact as it centralizes communication campaigns. Ultimately enhancing the information’s resonance. What’s more, it cuts across the board on Microsoft 365 which means you can publish important information on multiple channels and distribution groups easily.

Users will also get two new capabilities, Answers in Viva and People in Viva. The former comes with AI support which matches employee questions to answers and experts across the organization, availing all relevant information while the latter curates rich profile cards with information regarding the employee’s interests, knowledge, and team goals which makes it easier for colleagues to network and connect. These insights will
be available through Microsoft 365 profile cards and as a new app.

Leadership Corner will also be incorporated into the recently launched Viva Engage to serve as a platform where employees get to interact with leadership directly, share ideas and perspectives, and take part in organization initiatives. It will appear on top of the Storyline feature that recently reached general availability, which allows users to real-time updates and experiences.

These incorporations in Viva Goals “will bring goals into the flow of work including a richer integration with Microsoft Teams to check in on OKRs, an extension in Azure DevOps to complete work items, a connection to Power BI datasets to track KPIs and Key Results, and integrations with Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project for automatic project management updates.”

And finally, there will be enhancements between Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning, which will in turn make it easier for users to access content from LinkedIn Learning Hub directly from Teams. What’s more, learners will now be able to view custom content, curated learning paths, and complete courses within Viva. It is worth noting that, this integration can be set up directly from the settings on LinkedIn Learning Hub by admins, canceling out the need for APIs.

All these new applications and services coming to Microsoft Viva will be available in one convenient location, the new Viva Connections home experience. Users will also be provided with a tailored and personalized summary highlighting their productivity insights, recommendations, and employee experience information directly in their Outlook inbox every day.